The A.I. Investor
What Does It Do?
It uses Machine Learning on company financials to find value stocks.
How Do I Use It?
Either copy the A.I. Investor stock picks at your own risk, or make/tweak your own A.I. Investor to invest for you. Books explaining everything, including tutorials, and the associated code are available:
Is It Risky?
Yes.
Who Might Want This?
It's a simple bit of Machine Learning that literally picks stocks for you. If you trust viewable computer code more than a fund manager to manage your money, then this might be of interest to you. This kind of thing is more likely to appeal to younger people who are more sceptical of financial institutions, and want to know how to invest themselves. Millennials are turning to social media and apps more than traditional sources for financial knowledge. Quoting from The Wall Street Journal in March 2020:
42% of Millennials say they don’t know who to trust with their finances
The above figure contrasts with a 25% figure for baby boomers.
Why Might They Want It?
The costs for almost anything financial has come down. These days you can access financial reports for free, gain investing knowledge for free, trade stocks for free, and even buy exposure to the whole market for ~0.2% a year. With all this cheap information the retail investor is better informed than in the past, and with the widest range of investing tools available ever too.
Why not throw in a free A.I. stock picker for good measure? It can't be perfect (even professional fund managers aren't perfect), but at least you can see all of the code.
If you learn the investing skills yourself, you minimize the need to trust others with your finances.
Surely This Requires A Lot Of Skill?
It takes time to learn any skill, and investing in stocks is no different. My terse writing style aims to get the knowledge into peoples heads painlessly, from basic investing theory, to installing Python all the way to getting the A.I. Investor working.
Just following the A.I. Investor requires no skill.
What Does The Book Teach?
- Investing, not trading.
- Python coding.
- Machine Learning.
- Understanding for the code for the A.I. Investor, and how each part works.
I Don't Trust The A.I. Investor
I'm not perfect. At least all of the code is freely available to view, the performance is plotted out over time, even if it underperforms. Furthermore the transactions are recorded on the bitcoin blockchain, so I can't really hide underperformance, as much as I want to.
I Already Know Python
There's a second book that is more suitable for novices. It works on all stock markets worldwide (pretty much), covers investment theory a bit more in-depth as well as Modern Portfolio Theory. It would require tweaking to get it to work well for individual countries, but the basis is there.
Any Additional Costs?
Besides the book costs listed on Amazon, for the first book (the yellow one) a subscription to SimFin.com is needed if you want to the code to compute stock picks for you (€19.99/Month at time of writing). For the second book (the green one) a subscription to eodhistoricaldata.com is required (£79.99/Month at time of writing).
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